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Although the title of this post sounds like the sort of theme that Playboy occasionally runs (except that Playboy calls their models "girls," which grosses me out because we shouldn't see pictures of naked female children, but I digress), the women of mainstream media's op-ed pages really helped me get through the last year of the election. To be fair, just as we legitimately complain that women are grossly underrepresented in elected office, it is equally true that we are woefully represented on the op-ed pages.
Three years ago, the excptionally strong-voiced Katha Pollitt took this issue on in The Nation. In March 2007, Lee Rosenbaum at Culture Grrl painted this ugly picture of the situation:
...the more important question of why there are so few regular female Op-Ed columnists (as opposed to freelance contributors) on newspaper staffs. For many years, the Times has had only one---Maureen Dowd... The Times sometimes appoints "guest columnists" for short-term Op-Ed stints while regular columnists are away. The last two of those have been women, as if to make up for the chronic estrogen deficit. One of those, Ann Althouse, is a political blogger.
For an explanation of why women aren't anointed as regular Op-Ed pundits, we go to the one who is, Dowd. [Three] years ago, in Dish It Out Ladies, she wrote: There's an intense debate going on now about why newspapers have so few female columnists... Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman. It taps into myths of carping Harpies and hounding Furies, and distaste for nagging by wives and mothers... Men take professional criticism more personally when it comes from a woman....While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating.
What bothers me most is that women in power may be perpetuating the male stereotype that an opinionated women is, if not a harridan, an oxymoron... Gail Collins, the first woman to run The Times's editorial page and the author of a history of American women, [said]: "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."
Has the situation changed in the past 18 months? In an op-ed by Carol Jenkins, President of the Women's Media Center, that appeared in the July 16, 2008 issue of Christian Science Monitor, she reports that:
The absence of women as op-ed writers is perhaps the most telling marker of the status of women in media. The opinion pages reflect the work of our most respected thought leaders, they impact public policy, they drive our political process. To have women missing in action on these pages reinforces a pernicious, if subliminal, view of a woman's perceived capabilities.
Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell recently noted that fewer than 14 percent of the op-eds published by the paper this year were by women, and an equal percent by minorities. In a study looking specifically at op-ed pieces written by academics, researchers at Rutgers University found that almost all of the opinions came from men: 97 percent in The Wall Street Journal, 82 percent in The New York Times, and 78 percent in the Newark Star-Ledger.
But the problem goes beyond the bylines. The dismal representation of women on the op-ed pages is just the tip of the iceberg. Research from the Annenberg Public Policy Institute found that just 3 percent of the "clout" positions – the owners, publishers, and other ultimate decisionmakers – are women. The net effect of this is that almost everything we know about our world is cast through the male perspective. Women are just beginning to catch on to this fact.
Nope, doesn't appear to be much better overall. Worse, most women who have regular op-ed gigs are straight and white. Since there are so few women with perches from which to opine, this makes it more likely for readers to think that their words represent all women. Of course, that is as ridiculous as the notion that a few women in office represent the full specturm of women in society at large. The mission of Women in Media & News (WIMN) is to "increase women's presence in the public debate, emphasizing those who are least often heard, including women of color, low-income women, lesbians, youth and older women." If anything, this recent
